For creators who use Facebook Ads to run their event marketing, targeting audiences–the right audiences–is the key to selling tickets. The success of your event promotion depends on how able you are to get your ads in front of people most likely to attend. 

Most organizers utilize a single ad set. Why? When you do quick campaign creation in Facebook Ads Manager, you’re defaulted to a screen that prompts you to add interests. If you’re a comedy venue in Canada hosting a livestream stand-up, when Facebook asks you to enter interests that you think would be relevant for your shows, you'll default to what you know: Dave Chappelle, Comedy Central, etc. 

This is interest-based targeting, and it’s what Facebook pretty much defaults to. While there’s nothing wrong with interest-based targeting, it does have a limitation–it usually results in event organizers homing in on only interest-based audiences. To best leverage their ads and sell as many tickets as possible, event creators need to calibrate their targeting. 

We’re here to demystify all those audience options. Over the years, what we’ve found is that the profitability of audiences is consistent. By and large, the most profitable audiences are custom audiences. 

The Most Profitable Custom Audiences 

How do the different custom audiences stack up? Let’s take a look, beginning with the most profitable audience and working down to the least profitable audience.

Web Traffic: This audience consists of individuals who visit your event website or ticketing page

Facebook Events Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who visit your Facebook event pages and RSVP and ‘Going’ or ‘Interested.’ 

Customer List: This audience consists of your mailing list. Oddly enough, your past buyers and people on your mailing list aren’t always repeat event attendees.

Interest Audiences: This audience is the true workhorse of Facebook advertising. If you don't have the previous three data sources, this is your best shot of getting in front of new people.

Facebook Page Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who’ve liked your Facebook page or engaged with it (i.e., visited your page, commented or liked your posts). 

Instagram Engagers: This audience consists of individuals who’ve liked your Instagram account or engaged with it (i.e., commented or liked your posts). 

Other: This category consists of lookalike audiences, video engagers, and so forth. 

Remember: All of these audiences can be valuable. But if your budget is lean, tough choices need to be made. Prioritize: If you're trying to get your campaigns from zero to one, keep your audiences to web traffic, Facebook Events Engagers, and your customer list. 

The takeaway? Include different types of audiences in your campaigns—not just interest-based audiences. 

Automated Audience Building with ToneDen

The power of a tool like ToneDen is the way it allows event creators to automate their audience building. We provide a sophisticated yet easy-to-use toolkit to reach your customers across social media. 

ToneDen’s Audience Builder allows you to create a wide set of audiences that can be tuned to your liking. To create different audiences, access your Audience Builder when creating Facebook Ads within ToneDen. The audiences we see leveraged the least are, oddly enough, the most profitable: Website traffic, Facebook page, Instagram profile, and Facebook events engagement audiences are all underutilized.

ToneDen Audience Builder
Learn how ToneDen’s audience targeting features helped Nederlander Concerts sell-out a drive-in concert series and a livestream. Read the case study

Fortunately, it’s simple to target the most profitable audiences using ToneDen. And by coupling more audiences with custom audiences, you'll see significantly better returns on your campaigns. 

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